Find a Moonshine Distillery in a West Virginia Insane Asylum
From The Western Brewer – Jan. 1914
Perhaps the fact that West Virginia is to become a prohibition state on July 1 has led to experiments in whiskey-making by certain individuals who are unauthorized; or, perhaps it is all a mistake.
At any rate, an embryo distillery was recently unearthed at the Athens State Hospital for the Insane in that state and about 100 gallons of potential “juice” was confiscated.
The moonshine was discovered through olfactory processes by men who work about the carpenter shop. The head carpenter had been noticing an aroma about the shop for several days, and when he went to the unused basement to find the origin, he found in 5-gallon drug receptacles and large bottles about 100 gallons of corn souring in the water that had been poured over it. None of it had reached a stage further than soured slop, and hence was not liable for the government tax. It would only have been a matter of time, however, until the fighting state of fermentation would have arrived.
A patient who is a painter is suspected as the distiller. He stoutly maintains, however, that he is not crazy and should not be an inmate of the asylum, and to prove it points to the fact that he was making the whiskey; the person who drinks it, he says, is the one who is crazy.
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